It finally happened

Regarding the debunking of alpha/dominance theory -- here are a few quick links. Not as thorough as I would like to be, but I'm up to my eyeballs in playing catch up (we were gone all last week). I can add more later if anyone is interested. The information is easily found in a Google search. There are many reputable sources that support and elaborate on the following information.

The crux of the issues with alpha/dominance theory comes down to two basic points:

1. Dogs are not directly descended from wolves. They shared a common ancestor that became extinct. The most recent research I've seen indicates that wolves and dogs split from their common ancestor into distinct species at least 27,000 years ago.

Link

Genetic evidence from an ancient wolf bone discovered lying on the tundra in Siberia's Taimyr Peninsula reveals that wolves and dogs split from their common ancestor at least 27,000 years ago. "Although separation isn't the same as domestication, this opens up the possibility that domestication occurred much earlier than we thought before," said lead study author Pontus Skoglund, who studies ancient DNA at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Massachusetts. Previously, scientists had pegged the wolf-dog split at no earlier than 16,000 years ago.

So . . . dogs are not wolves, nor did they descend directly from wolves. They are distinct species that split many thousands of years ago. Modern wolves have little in common with our pet dogs.

2. The original wolf studies that led to alpha/dominance theory were conducted beginning in the 1930s. And they were highly flawed due to one glaring problem -- all the wolves that were studied were captives who had been thrown together. They were totally artificial packs, nothing at all like the family packs that form among wild wolves. Researchers now know that left to their own devices wolf packs are family units consisting of a breeding pair and their offspring. What researchers noted among the family wolf packs was a natural hierarchy that is very much like a human family -- the parents are at the top of the totem pole, followed by oldest sibling and on down the line to the youngest sibling. And once researchers started studying naturally formed packs they realized that what they saw as far as behavior bore little to no resemblance to what they'd seen in the captive wolves and had labeled "alpha" or "dominant" behaviors.

Link

"The concept of the alpha wolf as a "top dog" ruling a group of similar-aged compatriots," Mech writes in the 1999 paper, "is particularly misleading." Mech notes that earlier papers, such as M.W. Fox's "Socio-ecological implications of individual differences in wolf litters: a developmental and evolutionary perspective," published in Behaviour in 1971, examined the potential of individual cubs to become alphas, implying that the wolves would someday live in packs in which some would become alphas and others would be subordinate pack members. However, Mech explains, his studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The "alphas" are simply what we would call in any other social group "parents." The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has "won" a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents.

While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the "alpha" to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents' packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.

Further along in the above article, the author continues with this:

However, the outmoded idea of the "alpha wolf" still has some legs in a real-world area: dog training.

Just as, more than six decades ago, Schenkel extrapolated his wolf studies and applied them to domestic dogs, so too have many carried the notion of the "alpha wolf" over to dog training. Certainly, just as parent wolves hold dominance over their cubs and human parents hold dominance over their children, owners hold dominance over their dogs. Until my pup gets himself a credit card and a pair of opposable thumbs (and stops dissolving into delighted wiggles every time I tell him what a good little man he is), I'm pretty much the boss in our relationship. But some trainers take the idea of pack rank to the extreme; dog owners are given a laundry list of rules of how to maintain alpha status in all aspects of their relationship: Don't let your dog walk through the door before you do. Don't let her win a game of tug. Don't let him eat before you do. Some (famous) trainers even encourage acts of physical dominance that can be dangerous for lay people to execute. Much of this is a legacy of those old wolf studies, suggesting that we're in constant competition with our dogs for that pack leader position.

But, you might ask, mightn't domestic dogs behave much like wolves in captivity? Despite being members of the same species, wolves (even human-reared wolves) are behaviorally distinct from domestic dogs, especially when it comes to human beings. Take the famous experiment in which human-socialized wolves and domestic dogs are both presented with a cage with food inside. The food is placed inside a cage in a way that makes it impossible for either wolf or dog to retrieve it. The wolves will inevitably keep working at the cage, trying to puzzle out a way to remove the food. The dogs, after a few seconds of struggle, will look to a human as if to say, "Hey, buddy, a little help here?" Even if the hierarchical ranks were some innate part of lupine psychology, dogs have behaviors all their own.

For a summary of the problems with dominance theory from the honest to goodness true experts on dogs (veterinary behaviorists),
here is the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior position paper on dominance theory. Some snippets from the position paper:

Most unruly behaviors in dogs occur not out of the desire to gain higher
rank, but simply because the undesirable behaviors have been rewarded.

Despite the fact that advances in behavior research have modified our understanding of social hierarchies in wolves, many animal trainers continue to base their training methods on outdated perceptions of dominance theory.

While we can get ideas of the types of behaviors to study in dogs based on what we know about wolves, the best model for understanding domestic dogs is domestic dogs. Dogs have diverged significantly from wolves in the last 15,000
years. Ancestral wolves evolved as hunters and now generally live in packs consisting most often of family members (Mech 2000). Pack members cooperate to hunt and to take care of offspring. In a given year, generally only the alpha male and alpha female mate, so that the resources of the entire pack can be focused on their one litter. Dogs, on the other hand, evolved as scavengers rather than hunters (Coppinger and Coppinger 2002). Those who were the least fearful, compared to their human-shy counterparts, were best able to survive off the trash and waste of humans and reproduce in this environment. Currently,
free-roaming dogs live in small groups rather than cohesive packs, and in some cases spend much of their time alone (MacDonald and Carr 1995). They do not generally cooperate to hunt or to raise their offspring, and virtually all males and females have the opportunity to mate (Boitani et al. 1995). Marked differences in social systems, such as those just described, inevitably lead to notable differences in social behavior.

(Note that the AVSAB position paper was published in 2008. So the date they list for the split between dogs and wolves is more recent than the 27,000 years ago that the newest research indicates.)